Tiago Kieliger & Erik Scalfaro / Rivia
Bringing a new drug to market remains a long shot. Only around 10% of therapies that enter clinical trials ever make it through to approval, despite decades of scientific progress and billions poured into research.
At the same time, the trials themselves have only grown more complex — generating vast, fragmented streams of data that are often harder to manage than the science they are meant to validate.
It’s this disconnect — between cutting-edge therapeutics and outdated data infrastructure — that Rivia is trying to fix.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years in the pharma industry and I spent a lot of that time drowning in spreadsheets,” Erik Scalfaro, co-founder and CEO of Rivia, tells Pathfounders. “I would spend my day downloading hundreds of Excel files, manually formatting, consolidating data, and very little time actually understanding the patients that were being treated with these investigational drugs.”
The startup has just secured $15m Series A led by Earlybird, with participation from Defiant and existing investors Speedinvest — who led their $€3m seed round in 2024 — Amino Collective and Nina Capital, to continue accelerating time to market.
Recent FDA guidance has increasingly embraced innovation in trial design, conduct and technology, signalling a broader shift towards modernising how clinical trials are run. But while regulation is evolving, much of the underlying infrastructure has yet to catch up.
“There’s such a paradox between how awesome the science is, how far we’ve come with the therapies we’re developing, and, at the same time, how archaic and near-Neanderthal level we are with our ability to handle data,” Scalfaro says.
It was in this gap — between the scientific potential and the reality of the technology — that Scalfaro saw an opportunity to help researchers. The aim was to help them “reach the full potential of their research efforts” by organising their data better.
He went on to found Rivia in 2022 alongside CTO Tiago Kieliger, a former cyber security engineer for the Swiss defence department, Chief Medical Officer Henk Streefkerk, a neurovascular surgeon and Pietro Scalfaro, an executive physician, bringing together medical expertise and engineering talent to tackle one of the most persistent operational challenges in clinical research
An influx of clinical data
“This explosion of data, the increasing number of specialty data types, has really exacerbated over the last 10 years,” Scalfaro says.
Over the past decade, clinical trials have expanded far beyond traditional datasets, incorporating everything from clinical data and imaging to real-world patient data collected through wearables and self-written diary logs.
“The solutions over time, solved problems of their time,” he says. Big data capture systems like Veeva Systems and Medidata Solutions have helped digitise clinical trials and standardise data capture, but were not built to flexibly integrate the increasingly diverse data generated by each study.
These systems were not designed to work together, leaving researchers to manually stitch together fragmented data sets across platforms. Rivia aims to provide the underlying connecting layer for all this information.
“Each trial, each patient is unique,” Scalfaro says. “And so you need to have the ability, not only to bring data together, but to be able to configure it to match the specificities of each trial. And to do that, you need to have thought about that sequence of unify model specific logic and then point it to workflows.”
Because this is a new problem, defined by new levels of complexity and scale, it requires a fundamentally new approach to solving it, suggests Scalfaro.
The obvious next emerging topic that will drastically change the field is, of course, AI. While there was, Scalfaro says, a pull to build agents immediately when they started building the product two years ago, they made a conscious decision to focus on building a strong foundation first and to bring in agents later as an additional layer, rather than building the system around them from the outset.
A lot of these biotechs are really pioneering new therapies where there’s no alternative treatments. These are patients with no other solutions. There’s no standard of care. There’s nothing else
In the future, Scalfaro sees a shift with the introduction of agents slotting into workflows, helping to prioritise, categorise and not only increase efficiency but help make better decisions, proactively.
“It’s not just about data handling,” he says. “It’s now having agents to help you shift from a very reactive behaviour to much more proactive behaviour. Today it’s reactive because there’s too much volume, you don’t know what to look at. There’s thousands of issues.”
With each new trial, time to implement decreases. What might typically take weeks can now be done in 10 days, and the goal is to reduce this down to two hours over the next two years.
With the funds raised, the team plans to start building vertical agents on top of existing workflows, enabling its next evolution to look like an agentic workflow-driven platform, not removing the human from the loop, but automating a lot of the work before the point of decision making.
There are also plans to expand to the US, specifically Boston. As Scalfaro puts it, “the mecca of biotechs”.
Getting more treatments to market
Rivia is part of 40 global clinical trials, split roughly in half between the US and Europe across biotech and pharma early-stage trials.
There are three phases of clinical trials, and Rivia is proving a strong fit with trials in the first stage, where therapies move out of the lab and are tested on humans for the first time. At this stage, uncertainty is at its highest, and having faster, more integrated feedback — particularly for high-risk patients — can be critical.
“We really want to help biotechs bring new drugs to market more successfully at a fraction of the cost,” he says. “A lot of these biotechs are really pioneering new therapies where there’s no alternative treatments. These are patients with no other solutions. There’s no standard of care. There’s nothing else.”
This is a space Scalfaro knows well, having previously worked on cancer trials and other life-threatening diseases. The team also includes clinicians who have successfully brought drugs to market, grounding the company’s technology in real-world experience.
“Clinical trials are among the most complex and costly workflows in healthcare, yet much of the infrastructure remains fragmented and manual,” Christian Nagel, partner and co-founder of Earlybird, said in a statement. “Rivia has built a true intelligence layer for clinical operations, unifying data and embedding agents directly into high-impact workflows. We believe this approach has the potential to fundamentally improve trial execution, reducing costs while increasing speed and data integrity.”
As the volume and complexity of clinical data continues to grow, so too does the need for infrastructure that can keep pace. Better and more organised data won’t guarantee success, but it may significantly improve the odds, and in turn increase the number of therapies getting across the finish line.
Company info:
Offices: Zurich, Switzerland
Team size: 13
Founding team: Erik (CEO), Tiago Kieliger (CTO), Henk Streefkerk (Chief Medical Officer) and Pietro Scalfaro
Total funding: $15m Series A, €3m seed